


buried a hatchet (it's coming up lavender)

by perfectpro



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Werewolf Mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28906671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: There is genuine beauty in the world, he’d told her once, but she doesn’t know why she has to go to Paris or Rome or Tokyo when he can take her breath away right here in Mystic Falls.AU where werewolves share dreams with their mates.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 120





	buried a hatchet (it's coming up lavender)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Phoebe Bridger's Smoke Signals.

Caroline dreams of the moon, of blood and bodies and running her fingers through dark golden curls. And that’s all before the Salvatore brothers come to town. Her dreams, when she remembers them, don’t feel like dreams. Snatches of forgotten memories that never make sense when connected. 

She lies awake on full moons, restless and on edge. She’s always been this way, didn’t know there was a pattern for it until a middle school project charting moon cycles made her connect the dots. The night leading up and the night after too, she sleeps but never well, dreaming about a fist around her heart. When she wakes, gasping, she often can’t remember anything other than yellow eyes and fangs that pierce the thin skin of her neck.

Nothing makes sense, even after she’s becoming the one draining blood from bodies and too horrified about what she’s become to do anything about it. Has she been predicting her fate all along?

Vampirism means heightened experiences, means that there’s a new level to everything. It’s like someone went into her brain and turned the resolution up a thousand times. Windchimes are jarring, sunbeams are glaringly bright, and she starts holding her breath to avoid the scent of the high school cafeteria.

The dreams are heightened, too. She starts to remember more from them, thinks that most of the people in the dreams are the same from night to night. Names unknown, but they’re trustworthy; she feels it in her bones. It’s only after she’s turned that she starts to realize these can’t be ordinary dreams. She can smell the blood in them, feel the luxury of silk against her skin. There’s one man who shows up in them every night, and Caroline thinks she could recognize him out of them.

But whenever she tries to think of his face in her waking hours, her mind comes up blank.

-x-

Klaus has heard every myth known to man, and he’s become quite a few himself during his time walking the earth. Centuries spent looking to break the curse, and he suspects that he’s the world’s foremost expert on the lore of werewolves. It’s almost cute, how the modern vampires believe they’re made up and not creatures that howl at night. The things people will say.

Mates were something he learned about in the 1300s, before he was aware of even Katerina. An older woman, one who had never activated the curse, told him of her parents, how they were fated to be.

When her father was killed, her mother was dead by morning. 

“They met in their dreams,” she tells him, willing to tell him anything, motivated by the knife he holds to her throat.

A silly story, he’d thought at first, something she had said in an attempt to avoid her inevitable death at his hands. The more packs he came across, though, the more prevalent it seemed. Not guaranteed for each wolf, but common enough that they were aware of the stories as well. If it was a deception, it was long ingrained in the culture.

The story of mates becomes just one of the many things he’s learned about the species, about his species. He is just as much wolf as he is vampire, and one day he will break the curse to his dual nature. He will have no equal, and the line that he sires will be created in his image.

-x-

The Originals come to town, and Caroline passes her nights in fits of sleep, interspersed between hours laying awake and listening to the beating of her dead heart. The dreams are more than they’ve ever been before. More frequent, more realistic, more memorable. And yet she still is unable to think of the man who appears in all of them.

Every time she thinks she gets close, his countenance shifts, twisting into something unrecognizable.

On the full moons, she starts going for runs. If she isn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, she might as well get some exercise in. This is how Caroline Forbes, seventeen years old now and she will be for forever, handles these things. With a pair of running shoes as she hits the pavement. If nothing else, her stamina gets better. She’s the best cheerleader on the squad, the only one who can go through their routines without breaking a sweat, who isn’t panting for breath by the end.

Maybe it’s petty for a vampire to be proud of beating the non-supernaturally endowed with her athleticism, but she still suppresses a grin every time she tells them to run through it one more time.

It gets to the point where it’s distracting. She’ll be with Damon and Stefan, plotting ways to outwit the oldest vampires in history, and she can’t focus because she’s trying to remember the flavor of the blood from her dreams. Not that even with her paying attention they’d be any better at this, but it’s the thought that counts.

“Keep up, blondie,” Damon chirps from the armchair he’s plotting from.

She thinks about snapping his neck just to make a point. He isn’t expecting it; she’d be able to catch him off guard in the moment it would take for her to cross the room. The moment passes, though, and the only way they’ll all make it out alive is by sticking together.

She assumes that there will be plenty of other opportunities to make her displeasure for Damon known.

Instead, she gets swarmed by witches outside the Grille, and then she wakes up in the tomb. It doesn’t take a genius out to figure out that curse breaking needs sacrifice, and she was supposed to get to live forever. Immortality, provided she didn’t piss anyone off enough to end it earlier. She doesn’t even know this Klaus, this monstrous hybrid who will murder her and Tyler as a means to an end.

To make things worse, she’s losing her grip on reality. Flashes of scenes from her dreams play in front of her, interspersed between trying to catch Tyler up on what’s happening. There is so much blood. Thick and rich, straight from the vein, none of the wildlife diet Stefan has had her on.

“Get out, get out,” a gruff voice she’s never heard before tells her. He sounds urgent, as though she doesn’t know the peril that she’s found her way into, as though she wouldn’t be able to tell the outcome of what being kidnapped for a ritualistic sacrifice would naturally lead to. 

Every minute that passes makes the visions worse. Maybe they’ve progressed to hallucinations now if she’s having them like this, if she has to close her eyes and think of the dirt beneath her feet just to get a grip on what connects her to reality. When she looks around, she sees ballrooms and graveyards and grand castles. The scent of blood is overpowering, her clawing at her throat, but she doesn’t know if that’s an illusion as well. 

Tyler knows that she’s upset, but he’s probably drawing the natural conclusion that she’s worried about what’s going to happen to them. She’d laugh if she was capable of it, because he’s always so clueless about what actually goes on in her life. 

“Come on, blondie. Let’s get you out of here.” The words take her a minute to make sense of them, but she recognizes the voice, and she tries to focus on who it is.

For the first and only time in her life, the sight of Damon Salvatore is a relief. Not the least because she knows she’d have never managed the escape by herself, even if her vision could keep straight enough to tell what’s impossible and what’s actually before her. Because he’s Damon, she has to talk him into helping Tyler out as well.

Her heart is pounding, relief flooding her entire body as they make their way through the woods. She’s been saved from sacrifice, surely, but somehow she feels like she’s been saved from something else, something even more terrifying.

-x-

Despite all that they try to do to prevent it, the sacrifice happens, the hybrid unlocks the other part of his self, and all Caroline can feel is triumph. It rips through her in an instant, terrible and joyous all at once. Jenna died in her place, a makeshift vampire because no one will ever deny this man, and at the end of the ceremony she feels like she’s the one who has discovered her own dual nature. To know what is to come, to feel the wonder that surges through her, unbridled and animalistic. She horrifies herself.

She doesn’t think any of them sleep that night once she’s returned to her house. Elena is surely at the Salvatore boarding house, probably with Jeremy in one of the guest rooms. The Gilbert house is empty, because how could it not be? After all that’s happened, Jenna’s death, how will any of them ever go back?

Stefan extends the invitation to her as well, as they watch Elena lean against Damon as they leave the clearing. “No one needs to be alone right now,” he says, trying to convince himself of it.

The sight of his girl and his brother together is not as unfamiliar as it once was.

“My mom’s the sheriff,” Caroline tells him, as though her human mother will be able to do something if anything happens. “I’ll be fine.”

Being alone in her bedroom is better than being surrounded now anyway. She doesn’t feel the way they do, even though she knows she should feel awful. Everything in their lives will change, none of it good, and yet she can only think about that factually. Her emotion thrum through her, cycling through awe and excitement. It would be inappropriate at best to express those, so she isn’t tempted by the company he offers. Besides, she’d prefer to be alone tonight anyway. 

Klaus is undoubtedly running wild, discovering the freedom that his wolf form offers him. She wants to run again, like she always does at this time in the lunar cycle, but she restrains herself. Going outside is a death sentence, and still she feels drawn to the full moon that the vampire-werewolf basks in.

There will be no sleep tonight. Caroline watches the night from her window seat, the urge to leave stronger than ever, but she stays inside. 

What kind of monster is she becoming? Vampire, surely, with her fangs and dreams of spilled blood, but she knows those started even before she transitioned into a creature of the night. This attraction to the moon, though, makes no sense. Nor does the satisfaction she feels when they have failed to stop Klaus’s transformation.

-x-

The first time they meet, he kills her boyfriend.

“Tyler!” Caroline screams, panic wracking through her, because every hybrid experiment thus far has failed. She can’t lose someone else. Not Tyler, not like this.

In truth, she doesn’t think he notices her. She’s not his sister; she’s not the werewolf. There’s nothing special about a newborn baby vampire, forever frozen at seventeen, firmly on the Salvatore side in this battle. If he did notice her, he might have snapped her neck for fun. Or maybe he’d have put a fist around her heart and watched her beg for mercy before pulling it from her chest.

Not that she knows what passes for fun after someone’s been around for a millennium, but death seems like an easy way to keep it interesting. 

She catches his gaze as he leaves, and he’s on to the next step of whatever plan he has. Murdering Tyler was no more than a stop he had to make on his way to more power, and in all likelihood they’re off his mind until Tyler makes up with Klaus’s blood in his system. 

Tyler survives, because Elena’s blood is the secret ingredient that Klaus has been searching for, so Caroline has a hybrid for a boyfriend now. At least they can be undead together.

That night, she dreams of a wildness in her chest, of power the likes of which she’s never imagined. Elongated fangs pierce flesh, and nothing tastes as lovely as a fluttering pulse in the jugular vein, O positive bleeding freely into her mouth. She wakes up hungry, fangs having pierced her own lip, a drop of blood escaping before the wound heals over.

Her heart is racing, but she should be used to these kinds of things by now. Something feels different about it, now. More electric, closer to reality than it’s ever been before.

-x-

Betrayal has never stung quite like when Tyler bites her. On her birthday, no less. A birthday where she’s not even turning a year older, because she’s going to be seventeen forever. She’ll never be biologically old enough to vote, or rent a car, or drink. And now she’s going to die (like actually die, not just vampire die), and maybe she’ll never get to do any of those things anyway.

The hallucinations set in as they get her home. As strong as they were when she was kidnapped for the ceremony, and mostly the same ones. She hears the voice more frequently, more fervently than she remembers it being all those weeks ago, “I’m coming to you. I won’t let this hurt you.”

As far as hallucinations go, at least it’s not terrifying.

The visions are of herbs and plants, or maybe she’s in a forest somewhere. She’s been dreaming of the forest recently, the soft dirt under her feet. She doesn’t know where she is exactly, until she somehow becomes aware that she’s lying in bed.

In her childhood bedroom, where she’s going to die. On her birthday.

Is that ironic? She should have paid more attention in literature, she doesn’t even know what the literal definition of irony is, but a vampire dying on her first useless birthday feels like it should have some level of schadenfreude to the situation at hand. At least she’ll leave a good-looking corpse, but she’d have made the same one in a century or two as well. If Damon Salvatore got his bite cured and she doesn’t, she’s officially coming back to haunt everyone.

There’s something happening in the foyer, but she can’t hear it. The voice in her head, the one from her dreams, is telling her, “I’m almost there. Soon it won’t hurt anymore.”

But it does hurt. The pain makes her feel like she’s dying, because she is. Just curling in on her side makes her gasp with the effort of it. If she lives, she’ll never complain about menstrual cramps again and what bullshit it is that only women have to deal with them. 

The stairs creak and she listens to someone approaching, her mom and Matt having gone quiet downstairs. When Klaus enters the room, she blinks, tries to tell if this is another hallucination or not, but they’ve seemingly retreated or else settled on showing her one fluid narrative instead of swapping the scenery every few seconds.

For some reason, the pain starts retreating when she lays eyes on him.

-x-

She comes to his attention, truly to his attention after she’s suffered from a hybrid bite.

Klaus hadn’t really been thinking much when he’d told Tyler, “Bite her,” with a smile. Nothing like proving loyalties, and the girlfriend doesn’t matter much. Tyler’s precious Caroline will suffer the weakness, the hallucinations, and the deterioration that come with any werewolf bite, and if Klaus is feeling generous he’ll offer up some of his blood to keep the peace.

He doesn’t expect to feel generous in the first place, much less to go do it in person, but he tries to be conscious of where all of his blood is in a given moment. Even compelling someone into deliver it and return straightaway wouldn’t sit right with him, so he heads to the Forbes household himself.

The sheriff (begrudgingly) invites him inside. He isn’t surprised; her daughter’s welfare depends on it, depends on him.

He isn’t a dependable person. They’re lucky that he’s feeling charitable for some reason.

There is fury in the eyes of the boy he passes in the hallway. Not Tyler, so not a boyfriend, but protective all the time, and pitifully human as well. This poor girl, surrounded by people who feel that they need to protect her when she’s capable of overpowering them all. Her youth is so obvious.

The bedroom is that of a typical teenage girl, he notes when he first enters it. Neutral colors, a few personal trinkets spread throughout, and birthday cards positioned on her nightstand. Between the overbearing humans in the front of the house and the cards, it is so obvious how loved she must be. He glances over to find the woman of the hour, propped up against pillows in her bed. 

Maybe he’s going soft, but it’s a sad sight to see.

Pale and shaky, she wonders, “Are you going to kill me?” There’s fear there, yes, but also curiosity. Even with a hybrid bite, she isn’t convinced of her death sentence. 

“On your birthday? Do you really think so little of me?” He is a monster to them, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. He is, and so is his entire family, but they’re more than that. 

He isn’t shocked when she agrees with him, because it’s not like he’s given the people of Mystic Falls very many reasons to like him. Especially this girl, friend of the doppelganger, comrade of the Salvatore brothers. Girlfriend of his hybrid. She isn’t aware of his more redeemable qualities. 

When he shifts the blanket back, even he has to admit how impressed he is with the bite. Tyler truly was unable to resist the sire bond, attacking the girl that he professes to love. How weak some men are. The wound is inflamed, irritated, and it no doubt must be causing the girl quite a bit of pain. Still, she doesn’t beg him to heal her, and she doesn’t scream for him to go away if he isn’t going to do anything about it.

“My apologies. You are what’s known as collateral damage; it’s nothing personal,” he tells her, because it’s the truth. This young blond girl, on her way to graduating high school with all of her friends if they can make it out alive.

Klaus doesn’t remember what it is to be unimportant. It has been so long.

She looks so sad, so quiet, that he thinks she deserves something good in her life. “I love birthdays.”

Her sniffling attempt at a laugh is almost passable, and her jibe about his age is quite cute. She’s braver than he’d expected, this baby vampire.

Windchimes make music outside, and they would be too quiet for any human in the room to hear them. Caroline hasn’t even been a vampire for a year yet. The sound must still be jarring for her, so sudden and sharp and unpredictable. She hasn’t asked her mother to take them down, and suddenly he tries to imagine her as a human.

Careful and conscientious and in control, he presumes. She doesn’t want anyone to know that isn’t who she is anymore with this monster inside her. She must miss being human.

His heart goes out to her, this girl surrounded by people who love her, but none enough to be with her as she lays dying. Eternity can be a lonely thing indeed. He wonders if anyone has told her about the perks of their condition. Humans can’t understand what it is to be the most powerful creature in a room. They pity them for their lack of connection, their desensitized emotions. This poor girl has been so focused on the things that she misses that she’ll never come to appreciate the things that are new about her, and when he tries to point it out to her, she just denies it.

“I’m dying,” she whispers to him, her words half a moan caught on the edge of her pain.

“And I could let you die, if that’s what you want,” he tells her, coming forward and sitting on the edge of her bed. The action surprises her, but not more than the choice he offers. “There’s a whole world out waiting for you. Great cities, and art, and music. Genuine beauty, and you can have all of it.”

Her eyes are wide and blue, unable to superimpose this new man on the monster she’s known him to be. He thinks that in the same way no one has ever told her how incredible the supernatural can be, she’s never been told how worthwhile she is. This close to her, Klaus can tell that she’s beautiful. He’s never noticed before.

“You can have a thousand more birthdays. All you have to do is ask,” he says, the last part in a whisper. 

“I don’t want to die.” She says it like it’s a secret, like she should be ashamed of giving up on death when it will have to hunt her out again.

After he leaves, when she’s gotten his blood in her system and the wound is noticeably better, he returns home to pick out something from the selection of jewelry he’s picked up over the years. On a whim, he finds a bracelet, art deco style from the 1920s, inlaid with diamonds. Just the thing to replace the tacky trinket that Tyler had given her.

-x-

Leaving the Grille, she spots him sitting on a bench in the town square, a sketchbook open in lap, but his hands are still. He still hasn’t started working when she’s walked over, so she figures now is as good of a time as any to thank him. He did, after all, only save her life, and she’s nothing if not gracious.

She’s never going to thank Damon, but that’s just because he’s, you know, Damon.

“Are you an artist?” she asks, announcing herself from a few feet away. The effort is useless; he’s probably been aware of her since before she was aware of him.

Looking over to her, he spins the pencil through his fingers and says, “When I have a muse.”

That’s as good of an invitation as she’s about to get, so she sits down next to him, leaving a few inches of space between them. The benches aren’t big, but it helps that he’s not man-spreading at the moment.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, Klaus spinning his pencil but never putting it to paper, and Caroline finally works up the nerve to say, “Thank you for saving my life. Even if you’re the one who put it in jeopardy in the first place.” Because she appreciates it, but she doesn’t want to let him off too easily.

Squinting at her, he takes a moment to think and then says, “All the lifetimes I’ve lived, and I’ve never met someone like you.” His lips quirk up into a smile, small and genuine. It’s an unfamiliar look on him. She thinks he should wear it more often.

All of the lifetimes he’s lived. A thousand years old, with eternity before him. Caroline thinks about her future and can only see months ahead before she doesn’t know what’s to come. Things in Mystic Falls change so quickly. She looks in his eyes and sees the depth of his age in them, all those unknowable years. How simple her existence must seem in light of all that he’s been through.

She leans towards him, drawn to his magnetism. There’s some kind of energy that Klaus exudes that she can’t deny, reeling her in even as she reminds herself of all the wreckage he’s left in his path. 

Everyone is collateral damage to this man, even her, he said so himself, and yet she still finds herself pulled into his orbit. Even when she sees his eyes flash yellow, it feels more like a party trick than a threat. There is something so familiar about him, as new as he is. 

Lowering her gaze, she allows herself to admit, “I feel silly, letting you charm me like this.”

Her resolve should be stronger than this, should be able to withstand flattery and simple words. Even so, she reminds herself that they aren’t just simple words, remembering when he’d given her his blood to recover from Tyler’s hybrid bite.

“Nonsense, love,” he tells her, cupping her chin in his hand, running his thumb along her jaw. “I’ve had more practice being charming than you have resisting it. I’d be surprised if any boy here knew that’s what you deserve.”

If she finds the overall appeal of him to be magnetic, that is to say nothing of his touch. Her skin prickles with electricity, like she remembers the sun on her skin before she turned. The air between them is static, and she finds herself hungry for what is to come.

-x-

When she sleeps that night, her dreams aren’t made of marble hallways and blood, but rather an open clearing and sunlight pouring in from every angle. Her senses have changed since transitioning, but this is a different level of clarity. Every blade of glade has been rendered in perfect detail, drops of morning dew perched on their tips, weighing them down.

The morning air is heavy with humidity, and she sits in the grass, not minding the cool dew that touches her skin. There’s a sense of expectancy, but she doesn’t know why, because the rest of the meadow is empty except for the wildflowers that are in bloom around her.

She lays down, stretching her arms up and basking in the sun, willing herself to just enjoy the simplicity. The sun on her skin, the wind that brushes over gently. 

Impossibly, she feels almost human again. No burn in her throat, no need for a daylight ring on her finger, and no urge to find the closest heartbeat and tear into it. The simplicity of being a human is what she misses the most, even if when she was mortal she didn’t understand the alternatives.

An unknown amount of time passes, the longest she’s ever felt one consistent narrative in her dreams, and she hears a voice say, heavy with emotion, “There you are.”

Turning her head, she opens her eyes to reveal her empty bedroom, hands fisted in the sheets. Disappointment wracks her body, and she tries to remember those last few seconds, tries to remember the voice, tries to distinguish it, but the harder she tries the more the memory turns away from her.

Isn’t that how dreams are, though? The moment she realizes she wants to stay, to discover, to learn more… It’s always the same as the moment that she wakes up.

-x-

A few days later, there’s a drawing on her dresser, Klaus’s handiwork no less impressive than it was in the first one he’d left for her. The subject is of two hands, held together and resting on the grass. She can pick hers out by the daylight ring, and there’s no guessing as to who the other belongs to. Every stroke of the charcoal makes Klaus’s calloused hands look impossibly gentle. One of his hemp bracelets is partially shown on his wrist, because Klaus’s style is somewhere in the range between surfer bro and hipster.

Looking at it feels like a snapshot of something that she’s actually experienced, but that’s impossible. Even if the image stirs something in her, that doesn’t make it any more real than the charcoal on paper that it exists as.

Caroline flips the drawing over, but there’s no accompanying note. Clearly, Klaus was under the impression that it would be self-explanatory. Considering how charged every moment between them has been, she guesses that it is.

Placing it in a frame and setting it next to the one of the horse that he did for her after his mother’s party, she wonders if there will be more to join the growing collection. She thinks that she knows how it will feel to hold his hand, how his skin will feel next to hers. Their dead hearts pumping blood so hard that he might be able to hear her pulse in her wrist.

And the drawings do keep appearing. Always waiting for her in the morning, the same as that bracelet was once. Each one is more painstakingly detailed than the last, her eyelashes rendered in pastels that are navy, deep purple, olive green, every color except for black, and she looks ethereal.

It’s only when he leaves an inked sketch of her lying in the grass, one ear pressed to the earth with her eyes closed that she understands what he’s trying to tell her.

-x-

“You know what I dream about,” Caroline says when she finds him in the grand Mikaelson house, too astounded to bother with a preamble. Vampires can control dreams, but only when they’re physically with the person. She’s had these dreams her whole life, though, and even if she hadn’t, she isn’t willing to believe that Klaus has been doing anything other than leaving her presents when he sneaks through her window at night.

She’d stopped locking it. She might as well have given him an engraved invitation.

Klaus looks over to her and his lips do the twitch that she’s become accustomed to before relaxing into a full-fledged smile. There is genuine beauty in the world, he’d told her once, but she doesn’t know why she has to go to Paris or Buenos Aires or Tokyo when he can take her breath away right here in Mystic Falls. 

“I was wondering when you’d catch on, love. Was it really only the last one that gave it away?” he asks, standing and crossing over to her. He moves at a normal, human pace, and she doesn’t know why she wishes he was close enough to touch.

The last one was just the piece that she needed to look at them all through new eyes. The fountains of what she’d assumed at first to be water were so obviously blood, and the sharp objects that had seemed like thorns revealed themselves to be fangs on closer inspection. But the last one, of her utterly relaxed in a meadow, was too obvious to not connect the dots. That’s what she looks like in her dreams, in the dreams where she’s in the clearing, waiting patiently for someone.

Standing in front of him, she resists leaning into his touch. “I’ve been having those dreams since before I can remember,” she whispers, because this can’t be real.

He gives her a look of genuine apology. “I wasn’t let in on them until I was in touch with my wolf. And even then, it took a few of them before I realized what was going on. I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

With a steadying breath she manages to ask, “What do you mean?”

He takes her wrist, bringing her hand to slip into his, a mirror of one of the first things he drew for her. It was the first drawing she received from him after she dreamed of the clean grass, the sense of anticipation and expectantly. How a voice had called out to her, and when she’d opened her eyes, she’d been awake.

“There you are,” Klaus says, the words heavy with emotion, and _oh_. His voice has always been so familiar to her, even when she knew it shouldn’t be. There are so many questions she has for him, so many answers she needs, but for now she places the hand he’s not holding onto his cheek.

“Here I am,” Caroline agrees, and she leans in to kiss him. 

**Author's Note:**

> Before Klaus unlocks his werewolf side, Caroline doesn't share the same dreams as him, but dreams of his memories.


End file.
